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There is a small, sharp line in
this Sunday's first reading that I have not been able to stop thinking about
this week.
It comes from the Book of
Sirach, one of the wisdom books of scripture, and it does not waste time being
gentle about anger. Anger and fury, Sirach says, are both abominable, and the
sinful man will be held by them.
Held by them. Not: the sinful
man holds onto anger, as though anger were a possession he could set down
whenever he chose. Held by them, as though anger were the one doing the
gripping. Sirach understood something about resentment nearly twenty-two centuries
before modern psychology caught up to it: a grudge is not a tool you use
against someone else. It is a set of hands closed around your own throat.
Forgive
your neighbor, if he has harmed you, and then your sins will be forgiven you
when you pray. (Sirach 28:2, CPDV)
The
Logic Sirach Actually Uses
I want to walk through the
actual argument Sirach makes, because it is sharper than a simple command to be
nice.
A man holds onto anger against
another man, Sirach asks, and does he then seek a remedy from God? He has no
mercy on a man like himself, and does he then entreat for his own sins? Sirach
is not appealing to sentiment here. He is pointing out something close to a
contradiction. You cannot walk into prayer holding a wound you refuse to
release, and expect God to release yours. It is not that God is keeping score
in some petty transactional way. It is that the posture required to forgive and
the posture required to be forgiven are the same posture. You cannot hold your
hand open to receive and clenched shut to withhold at the same time.
Then Sirach gives the sentence
that stopped me this week: remember your very end, and let animosities cease.
Remember death and decay, and cease from sin.
That is not morbid. It is
clarifying. Sirach is asking us to hold our grudges up against the true scale
of a human life, which is short, and to notice how absurd it is to spend any of
that short scale nursing a wound that time was always going to erase anyway.
Remember your end. Let the animosity go before the ending does it for you,
without your consent, and without the peace that choosing to release it would
have given you.
Living
the Real Thing
I have written to you before
about the difference between an authentic faith and the loud, hollow imitation
of it currently dominating so much of American public life. Christian
Nationalism, whatever else it claims to be, has shown remarkably little interest
in this particular teaching. A movement organized around grievance, dominance,
and the permanent identification of enemies has no real use for a wisdom book
that tells its readers to let animosities cease and overlook the ignorant
offenses of their neighbor.
I want to say plainly that this
is one of the clearest tests available for telling real Christianity from its
counterfeit. Not the loudest voice. Not the most confident claim to biblical
authority. Whether a movement, a leader, or a church actually asks its people
to do the hard work of releasing a grudge, or whether it simply keeps finding
new grudges to hold. Authentic faith in Jesus asks the harder thing. It always
has.
Come
Celebrate With Us
I will not tell you what
Sunday's sermon says about forgiveness. Come hear it in person or online, and
find out.
But I do want to tell you about
something else coming up that I hope you will put on your calendar now. In
October, this parish celebrates the Feast of Saint Francis of Assisi, our
patron, and this year that feast also marks twenty-three years of Saint Francis
Parish and Outreach in Augusta, Georgia.
Twenty-three years of trying to
be a house where love and acceptance are not slogans but daily practice.
Twenty-three years of Blessing Bags, of standing at Pride with something real
to offer, of insisting from this pulpit that the Gospel means something for the
poor, the immigrant, the queer person, and everyone else too many churches have
decided does not belong. We would love for you to be part of marking that
milestone with us, whether you have been with us since the beginning or have
never once visited.
If you have been curious about
this community, if something in these posts has made you wonder what a church
built on Sirach's kind of forgiveness and Francis's kind of simplicity might
actually look like in practice, this fall is a good time to come find out.
Come this Sunday. Come in
October. Come whenever you are ready. The table has room.
Pax
et Bonum,
Bishop Greer | 
